John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

Despite many EHR vendors best efforts to tell you otherwise, an EHR requires every organization to reconsider their workflow. Sure, many of them can be customized to match your unique clinical needs, but the reality is that implementing an EHR requires change. All of us resist change to different degrees, but I have yet to see an EHR implementation that didn’t require change.

What many people don’t like to admit is that sometimes change can be great. As humans, we seem to focus too much on the down side to change and have a hard time recognizing when things are better too. A change in workflow in your office thanks to an EHR might be the best thing that can happen to you and your organization.

One problem I’ve seen with many EHRs is that they do a one off EHR implementation and then stop there. While the EHR implementation is an important one time event, a quality EHR implementation requires you to reconsider your workflow and how you use your EHR on an ongoing basis. Sometimes this means implementing new features that came through an upgrade to an EHR. Other times, your organization is just in a new place where it’s ready to accept a change that it wasn’t ready to accept before. This ongoing evaluation of your current EHR processes and workflow will provide an opportunity for your organization to see what they can do better. We’re all so busy, it’s amazing how valuable sitting down and talking about improvement can be.

I recently was talking with someone who’d been the EHR expert for her organization. However, her organization had just decided to switch EHR software vendors. Before the switch, she was regularly visited by her colleagues to ask her questions about the EHR software. With the new EHR, she wasn’t getting those calls anymore (might say something good about the new EHR or bad about the old EHR). She then confided in me that she was a little concerned about what this would mean for her career. She’d kind of moved up in the organization on the back of her EHR expertise and now she was afraid she wouldn’t be needed in that capacity.

While this was a somewhat unique position, I assured her that there would still be plenty of need for her, but that she’d have to approach it in a little different manner. Instead of being the EHR configuration guru, she should becoming the EHR optimization guru. This would mean that instead of fighting fires, her new task would be to understand the various EHR updates that came out and then communicate how those updates were going to impact the organization.

Last night I had dinner with an EHR vendor who told me that they thought that users generally only used about 50% of the features of their EHR. That other 50% of EHR features presents an opportunity for every organization to get more value out of their EHR software. Whether you tap into these and newly added EHR features through regular EHR workflow assessments, an in house EHR expert who’s constantly evaluating things, or hiring an outside EHR consultant, every organization needs to find a way to regularly evaluate and optimize their EHR workflow.

As that article puts it: … a process that is used to evaluate whether a product, service, or system complies with regulations, specifications, or conditions imposed at the start of a development phase.

Another way of putting it is EHR system manufacturers who are unable to accommodate a healthcare organization’s “best practice” workflows, should re-consider their architectures.

Organizational workflows are the result of continuous process improvement and provide much of an organization’s competitive advantage.

The happy scenario is where organizations are able to build, own and manage their own workflows, with minimal need to involve EHR software manufacturers.

The software needs for healthcare organizations include process mapping, a compiler to generate “best practices” process templates, a run-time Case management system and a data exchanger for seamless connectivity with local and remote 3rd party systems and applications.